History of Gmail

Gmail (Google Mail in Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom) was announced in 2004 amid a flurry of rumor. Owing to April Fool's Day, the company's [http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html press release] was greeted with skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google had already been known to make April Fool's Jokes (such as [http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html PigeonRank] ). However, they explained that their real joke had been a press release saying that they would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a " [http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html Google Copernicus Center] " on the Moon. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3591589.stm quoted by BBC News] as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."

Gmail also initially received a lot of criticism for a statement they made in their original terms of use, refusing to guarantee that all e-mails at Gmail would be deleted upon request by the user. Google later clarified that they were referring to backup copies of e-mails, and promised that all deleted mails would eventually be expunged completely from their servers. This, along with the feature that advertisements would be generated by software-based scanning of e-mails in order to better target them, gave rise to a controversy on web privacy (see [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3602745.stm BBC News Article] ; for a defense see [http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4707 The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus] ).

As of June 22 2005, Gmail's canonical URI has been [http://mathibus.com/blogmarks/2005/06/gmail-goes-301 changed] to http://mail.google.com/mail/ instead of http://gmail.google.com/gmail/.

Internal development

Gmail was a project begun by Google developer Paul Buchheit years before it was ever announced to the public. For several years, the software was available only internally, as an email client for Google employees. It was hosted under the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.

Beta testing phase

Google initially invited about 1,000 employees, friends, and family members to become beta testers, with trials beginning on March 21, 2004. Active users from the Blogger.com community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing on April 25, and later, Gmail members occasionally received "invites" which they could extend to their friends. One round of invites was sent out on May 1, and another three invitations were given to all active members on June 1; by mid-June, the number of invitations had increased, with many users receiving between three and five invites daily. On February 2, 2005, the invitation interface was changed to make it easier to give invites by simply entering an e-mail address. At approximately 3:00 UTC on February 3, 2005, some Gmail users were awarded 50 invites, and more recently, 100 invites, suggesting that Gmail would soon go public. Attending a Google Mini webinar or using Google Mobile would also yield a Gmail invitation.

During the initial months of the Gmail beta, Gmail's well-publicized feature set and the exclusive nature of the accounts caused the aftermarket price of Gmail invitations to skyrocket. According to PC World magazine, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay for as much as US$150, with some specific accounts being sold for several thousand dollars. After a new round of invitations in early June, the price for invitations fell down to between US$2-$5. Several philanthropic Gmail users have utilized services such as the now defunct GmailSwap to donate invitations to people who want them. On June 28, Google amended its policy to forbid the selling of registered accounts. See the [http://www.google.com/gmail/help/program_policies.html Official Gmail Program Policy] .

Current status

In March 2004, Google said that Gmail would probably be released publicly after six months of testing, which would have placed their launch in September 2004. Speculation also regarding the release date is right after "The New York Times" said they had "credible sources" saying "Gmail will be released publicly by the end of the year 2005." As of September 2008 however, the site still says it is in the beta development stage. The number of invitations existing account holders can send has been varied, presumably to control the usage and growth of the system. The use of the invitation/text message system helped prevent spammers from registering numerous accounts for purposes of spamming, and ensured that any account used illegally would have another valid e-mail address or phone number to trace a user (the one to which the invite was sent).

In January 2005, security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private e-mails from any Gmail user's account. This was [http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/12/1655246&tid=172&tid=215&tid=217&tid=218 posted] with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot at 9:23 a.m. PST on January 12, 2005. At roughly 10:15 a.m. PST on January 13, 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem, and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, this raised concerns among some users who use Gmail as their primary mail account.

On April 1, 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB (advertising it as 2GB plus) and introduced some other new features, including formatted editing (giving users the option of sending messages in HTML or plain text).

On June 7, 2005, [http://isnoop.net/gmail/ Isnoop.net Gmail Invite Spooler] was deactivated by the site moderator, due to intolerance by Google. It was explained that Gmail's Product Manager would no longer tolerate the service, and was shut down midnight PDT. The service was featured in Popular Science magazine, and had given out over 1.2 million Gmail accounts.

Starting on July 11, 2005, or more likely earlier, Google gave away free Gmail accounts to random people who searched for the word "gmail" using the Google search engine. A promotion link would appear at the top of the page displaying "New! Get Gmail - Google's free e-mail service with over 2GB of storage." This has since expired.

On August 24, 2005, Google offered a new method of signing up for a Gmail account via mobile phone text messaging. The public would be able to obtain an account by submitting a U.S. mobile phone number to Google, which would then send a text message with an invitation code that would be used to create a Gmail account. Numbers are stored in order to keep track of the number of accounts created which is limited to ten per phone number. This method of creating accounts makes it difficult for spammers to send out spam messages, getting spam delivered, or obtaining an account thus keeping Gmail as spam-free as possible. This method is currently available only to people with a U.S., Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, New Zealand, Turkey mobile phone number. See [https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1 https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1] .On August 30, 2005, Gmail started to add the facility to customize the address that messages are sent from on outgoing mail to some accounts. This adds option for outgoing messages to appear as if they had been sent from an alternative e-mail address, rather than from the Gmail account. Right now, this option is available only for accounts that have set English (US) as Gmail display language. [https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=20616 Gmail Help Center.] , but users can switch to another language and keep using this feature after adding another address.

In August 2005, Gmail started offering 100 invites to some users.

In October 2005, Gmail withdrew use of "username"@gmail.com within the UK, due to a dispute with the UK company Independent International Investment Research (IIIR), who own the "gmail.co.uk" domain. From October 19, any new UK users wanting a gmail account were forced to have "username"@googlemail.com. There is still a concern that old UK users will also have to change to the new domain sometime in the future.

In December 2005, Gmail added a "Vacation responder" (to provide automatic response to e-mails), and Contact Groups (allowing e-mail to be sent to a number of contacts, in a user defined group).

On December 16, 2005, Google quietly released a version of Gmail for the mobile device (phone interface access through http://m.gmail.com), which they named "Gmail Mobile" [http://www.google.com/glm/gmail] , [http://gmail.pro/2005/12/16/google-officially-introduces-gmail-mobile] This product competes with, and has features similar to an open source version of Gmail Mobile 1.0 which was launched just 3 weeks earlier by the SourceForge community.

On January 17, 2006, Gmail added a delete button to the menu bar. This now allows users to easily delete their messages.

On February 7, 2006, Gmail added the ability for users to chat with others on their contact list when logged into their account. A Quick Contacts box displays names of people that are emailed most often and when a name is clicked, a chat session or email will start. Chat sessions will then show up on the bottom right corner or it can be popped-out into a new window. Users have the option to save their chats in a Chat History.

On April 4, 2006, Gmail was integrated into the newly released "Google Calendar" service. [http://calendar.google.com] .

Since November, 2006 it became impossible to use GMail's full version with browsers using an earlier version of the Gecko than 1.7.x, as these hanged, unless their UA string was modified to something older. This affected Mozilla 1.6, K-Meleon 0.8.2 and lower versions; Therefore Mozilla 1.7.x, Mozilla Firefox 1.x or K-Meleon 0.9 should be used instead.

On November 2 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application based version of its Gmail product for mobile phones capable of running Java applications . Those interested in using the application can download it from [http://www.gmail.com/app gmail.com/app] directly from their mobile phone. In addition, Sprint announced separately that it would make the application available from its Vision and Power Vision homepages and which will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones [ [http://www.betanews.com/article/Google_Offers_Javabased_Mobile_Gmail/1162487108 Google Offers Java-based Mobile Gmail] , retrieved 2 November 2006] . The application gives Gmail its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-based application would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (like photos, Word documents) in the application [ [http://news.com.com/2061-12572_3-6131868.html Google Mail goes mobile. RSS too.] , retrieved 2 November 2006] .

On January 28, 2007, Google Docs & Spreadsheets was integrated with Gmail, with the ability to open Microsoft Word DOC files directly, when you receive an attachment. [http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=460]

On February 8, 2007, Gmail registration opened to the public, however remains in beta.

on October 24, 2007, Google announced that IMAP was available for all accounts, including Google Apps for your Domain. [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/sync-your-inbox-across-devices-with.html]

Gmail for your domain

On February 10 2006, Google introduced [https://www.google.com/hosted/Home Gmail for your domain] . This service, currently in beta testing, allows organizations to offer e-mail services through Gmail using their own domain. [https://www.google.com/hosted/jaguars.sjcc.edu San Jose City College] is one of the organizations currently using this service. Google may eventually open the service to all domain owners, as Microsoft has with its [http://domains.live.com/ Windows Live Custom Domains] service.

Gmail in other languages

*On April 13, 2005, Gmail became available in several languages: British English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and simplified and traditional Chinese.
*On June 30, 2005, Gmail became available in 4 new languages: Danish, Finnish, Polish, and Swedish.
*On August 9, 2005, Gmail became available in 12 new languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
*In the beginning of September 2005, Gmail became available in 9 new languages: Catalan, Czech, Estonian, Hindi, Lithuanian, Romanian, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish.
*From the end of May 2006, Gmail started to support Arabic and Hebrew, which requires support for bi-directional text.

Name change in Germany and in the UK

Gmail in Germany

The German version of Gmail was first named Gmail Deutschland. Unfortunately for Google, the German company Giersch Ventures had already trademarked "G-mail" in 2001. The company later filed a lawsuit against Google for trademark infringement.

On 4 July 2005, Google announced that "Gmail Deutschland" would be rebranded "Google Mail". From that point forward, visitors originating from a German IP would be forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain. Any German user who wants a gmail.com address must sign up for an account through a proxy. German users who were already registered were allowed to keep their old addresses.

Despite this limitation, German users can still be emailed at their corresponding address containing the gmail.com domain. In many respects, the googlemail.com address is simply an alias. A German user interested in having their mail sent to gmail.com can simply change their reply-to address.

The Giersch Ventures lawsuit also forced Google to change the site's URL from gmail.google.com to mail.google.com, which briefly broke some applications and plugins that relied on this address to access the mail service.

Gmail in the UK

On 19 October 2005, the UK version of Gmail was converted to Google Mail for similar reasons to those described above for Germany [http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en-GB/googlemail.html] .

To register a @gmail.com email address in the UK, a proxy server such as [http://www.vtunnel.com/ VTunnel] to avoid the @googlemail.com address UK residents are given. On the 9th of February 2006, users in the UK and Germany appeared to be seeing the main logo "Gmail+Chat" as opposed to the expected Google Mail logo. However, on the following day, it was changed back to Google Mail, suggesting a mistake in the process.

References